in a place little known, long forgotten.

What is the difference between the swastika and the Confederate flag?

I don't know. And it terrifies me.

With my family being from all over the Southern United States, reading its literature has pretty much made me realize that – my entire life – I have been attempting to rationalize where I come from. The white pillars holding together my great uncle's front porch used to excite me. Now all I can think about when I picture them is the hate and blood and rope and crosses and cattle that were burned in those pillars' honor. Deny it all I want, the South is full of ghosts. Full of justifications for racial inequity. And although the inequity that exists in the South today is much different than it was in the 1960's, I hate that such a glaring inequity still exists there.

When I think of the South this way, it makes me hate where I have come from, hate everything my family's name was built on. I love my father and I loved my grandfather with all of my heart, but I hate those who I didn't know. I can't stop it. Thinking that they might have taken part in such heinous crimes. Even just the thought of them committing the heinous crime of ignoring others' heinous crimes. And all of the ghosts that the South has tried to live down with their "Don't tread on me"'s and their beautiful smiles, they have followed me here to California. And they will follow me everywhere I go.

There is no way to stop what has already been played out. I can't edit it out. I can't pretend it never existed. All I can do is cling to the hope that what my father said is true, that his side of the family, at least, fought for the Union and against a way of life they didn't believe in.